https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2020-predictions-calibration-results At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them (this year I’m very late). Here are 2014 , 2015 , 2016 , 2017 , 2018 , and 2019 . And here are the predictions I made for 2020. Some predictions are redacted because they involve my private life or the lives of people close to me. Usually I use strikethrough for things that didn’t happen, but since Substack doesn’t let me strikethro...
Apr 07, 2021•17 min•Ep. 459
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ambidexterity-and-cognitive-closure Back in a more superstitious time, people believed left-handers were in league with the Devil. Now, in this age of Science, we realize that was unfair. Yes, left-handers are statistically more likely to be in league with the Devil. But so are right-handers! It's only the ambidextrous who are truly pure! At least this is the conclusion I take from Lyle & Grillo (2020) Why Are Consistently-Handed Individuals More Authori...
Apr 04, 2021•15 min•Ep. 458
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/ [Content note: scrupulosity and self-esteem triggers, IQ, brief discussion of weight and dieting. Not good for growth mindset.] I. I sometimes blog about research into IQ and human intelligence. I think most readers of this blog already know IQ is 50% to 80% heritable , and that it’s so important for intellectual pursuits that eminent scientists in some fields have average IQs around 150 to 160 . Since IQ this high only appears in...
Apr 03, 2021•35 min•Ep. 457
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/oh-the-places-youll-go-when-trying I. What is the right dose of Lexapro (escitalopram)? The official FDA packet insert recommends a usual dose of 10 mg, and a maximum safe dose of 20 mg. It says studies fail to show 20 mg works any better than 10, but you can use 20 if you really want to. But Jakubovski et al's Dose-Response Relationship Of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors tries to figure out which doses of which antidepressants are equivalent to each...
Apr 01, 2021•18 min•Ep. 456
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/towards-a-bayesian-theory-of-willpower I. What is willpower? Five years ago, I reviewed Baumeister and Tierney's book on the subject. They tentatively concluded it's a way of rationing brain glucose. But their key results have failed to replicate , and people who know more about glucose physiology say it makes no theoretical sense . Robert Kurzban, one of the most on-point critics of the glucose theory, gives his own model of willpower: it's a way of minimiz...
Mar 26, 2021•15 min•Ep. 455
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-antifragile-diversity-libertarianism In yesterday's review of Antifragile , I tried to stick to something close to Taleb's own words. But here's how I eventually found myself understanding an important kind of antifragility. I feel bad about this, because Taleb hates bell curves and tells people to stop using them as examples, but sorry, this is what I’ve got. Suppose that Distribution 1 represents nuclear plants. It has low variance, so all the plants ...
Mar 26, 2021•13 min•Ep. 454
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-antifragile Nassim Taleb summarizes the thesis of Antifragile as: Everything gains or loses from volatility. Fragility is what loses from volatility and uncertainty [and antifragility is what gains from it]. The glass on the table is short volatility. The glass is fragile: the less you disrupt it, the better it does. A rock is “robust” - neither fragile nor antifragile - it will do about equally well whether you disrupt it or not. What about anti...
Mar 25, 2021•35 min•Ep. 453
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adding-my-data-point-to-the-discussion [ warning: boring inside baseball post ] From The Hypothesis : Here's Why Substack's Scam Worked So Well . It summarizes a common Twitter argument that Substack is doing something sinister by offering some writers big advances. The sinister thing differs depending on who's making the argument - in this case, it's making people think they could organically make lots of money on Substack (because they see other writers do...
Mar 24, 2021•7 min•Ep. 452
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan I. If you only learn one thing from this post: it's pronounced "air-do-wan". If you learn two things from this post, learn that, plus how a country which starts out as a flawed but somewhat-liberal democracy can lapse into near-dictatorship over the course of a few years. I got The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turkey because, as a libertarian, I spend a lot of time worrying about the risk that my country might backs...
Mar 20, 2021•49 min•Ep. 451
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-death Melancholic depressive patients report that they feel worst in the morning, just after waking up, get better as the day goes on, and feel least affected in the evening just before bed. Continue the trend, and you might wonder how depressed people would feel after spending 24 or 36 or 48 hours awake. Some scientists made them stay awake to check, and the answer is: they feel great ! About 70% of cases of treatment-resistant depressi...
Mar 18, 2021•17 min•Ep. 450
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-mantic-matt-y The current interest in forecasting grew out of Iraq-War-era exasperation with the pundit class. Pundits were constantly saying stuff, like "Saddam definitely has WMDs, trust me, I'm an expert", then getting proven wrong, then continuing to get treated as authorities and thought leaders. Occasionally they would apologize, but they'd be back to telling us what we Had To Believe the next week. You don't want a rule that if a pundit ...
Mar 15, 2021•16 min•Ep. 449
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/richard-nixon-vs-cool In the highlights post on class , I wrote: When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar ...
Mar 13, 2021•6 min•Ep. 448
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences I. An article by Adam Grant called Differences Between Men And Women Are Vastly Exaggerated is going viral, thanks in part to a share by Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg. It’s a response to an email by a Google employee saying that he thought Google’s low female representation wasn’t a result of sexism, but a result of men and women having different interests long before either gen...
Mar 13, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 447
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-basic-problem Introduction and review Last month I talked about van der Bergh et al’s work on the precision of sensory evidence , which introduced the idea of a trapped prior . I think this concept has far-reaching implications for the rationalist project as a whole. I want to re-derive it, explain it more intuitively, then talk about why it might be relevant for things like intellectual, political and religious biases. To review: the bra...
Mar 11, 2021•29 min•Ep. 446
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-consequences-of-radical-reform The thread that runs from Edmund Burke to James Scott and Seeing Like A State goes: systems that evolve organically are well-adapted to their purpose. Cultures, ancient traditions, and long-lasting institutions contain irreplaceable wisdom. If some reformer or technocrat who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room sweeps them aside and replaces them with some clever theory he just came up with, he'll make everything much w...
Mar 10, 2021•12 min•Ep. 445
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-class To my surprise, we have some genuine upper-class people reading this blog. Here’s what they thought, starting with Cabayun : While I hardly grew up in the upper-upper world Fussell is describing (though my grandparents and to a lesser extend parents surely did), a lot of the particulars stood out to me as right on the money (the food, names, boring social scene almost by design, locations, house/furniture descriptions). ...
Mar 07, 2021•22 min•Ep. 444
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-march [link back to the original links post: here ] On the article about privateers , local naval expert Bean writes: It's time for the standard disclaimer any time Proceedings comes up: Proceedings is intended as a forum for discussion of matters of interest to naval officers, and it is not peer reviewed. Often very not peer reviewed. Like in this case. Please don't judge the USNI on the basis of this stuff. They do a lot of ...
Mar 05, 2021•18 min•Ep. 443
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-march Warning: I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, so you may want to read this online instead of in an email, to catch the edits. Some of these are from my six-month backlog and may be outdated. 1: From a colonel writing for the US Naval Institute - Unleash The Privateers! “Th...
Mar 04, 2021•21 min•Ep. 442
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/shilling-for-big-mitochondria In the 1930s, a shady outfit called Isabella Laboratories made a popular over-the-counter diet pill called Formula 281 (slogan: "281 for the too weighty one"). If you're familiar with any of: the 1930s, shady pharma, or diet pills, your next question will be "did it contain amphetamines?". Actually, no! It contained 2,4-dinitrophenol, a mitochondrial uncoupling agent. DNP is that rarest of birds: a weight-loss pill which really ...
Mar 03, 2021•18 min•Ep. 441
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-scoring-rule-controversy Metaculus scoring rule controversy Zvi considered using some Metaculus markets for his weekly coronavirus roundup, but was turned off by the scoring rules . Ross Rheingans-Yoo writes about the issue here . Everyone agrees Metaculus’ scoring rule is “proper”, a technical term meaning that it correctly incentivizes you to choose the probability you think is true. Zvi and Ross’s objection is that it doesn’t correctly incen...
Mar 02, 2021•12 min•Ep. 440
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bay-area-plant-based-meat-reviews By this point you’ve probably tried Impossible Burgers, and you know that restaurants can do some pretty impressive things with them. But there are so many interesting meat dishes - what if you want something other than a burger? This market is still developing, but I live in the Bay Area, which is probably its epicenter. And I’m mostly-vegetarian, so I have no choice but to try it out. I tried eight restaurants which offere...
Feb 26, 2021•19 min•Ep. 439
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans Read this first: Book Review: Fussell On Class Dear Republican Party: I hear you're having a post-Trump identity crisis . Your old platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever no longer excites people. Trump managed to excite people, but you don't know how to turn his personal appeal into a new platform. Most of what he said was offensive, blatantly false, or alienated more people than it won; absent his personal magic it...
Feb 26, 2021•24 min•Ep. 438
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class I. Paul Fussell wants to talk about class . (well, wanted, past tense, it's a 1983 book, we'll come back to that later) He recognizes this might not be the most popular topic. When he tells people he's writing a book on class in America, "it is as if I had said I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals." America likes to think of itself as a classless society. Sure, ther...
Feb 25, 2021•35 min•Ep. 437
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-judging-april-covid Since this is getting broader than just Metaculus, I'm changing the name to Mantic Monday, after an obscure word for "oracular" (and changing the preview image to a mantis, since I don't know how else to visually represent "mantic". And posting it early Tuesday morning because I’m late). In April 2020, I made my yearly predictions , and many of them were about the (then new) coronavirus pandemic. Two other people on Less Wro...
Feb 24, 2021•18 min•Ep. 436
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-look-down-track-b I. Depression probably has something to do with decreased synaptogenesis in the brain , maybe the hippocampus in particular. Neurons are less likely to respond to stimuli by connecting to other neurons. The whole network becomes sparser than usual, and dysfunctional thought-loops that thrive in sparse network conditions start taking over. We understand parts of the pathways that regulate synaptic growth. When the body wants more synapses,...
Feb 22, 2021•18 min•Ep. 435
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ezra-klein-on-vetocracy In my review last week of Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized , I linked to a related Vox article on vetocracy : In a viral essay, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen makes a simple exhortation: It’s time to build. Behind the coronavirus crisis, he writes, lies “our widespread inability to build.” America has been unable to create enough coronavirus tests, or even enough cotton swabs to fully utilize the tests we do have. We don’t have en...
Feb 20, 2021•11 min•Ep. 434
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cult DeBoer argued that charter schools succeed through selection effects: they only take the best students. Several commenters pointed out this was illegal. It is, but they’ve found loopholes. Here's Alexander H : I attended a charter school all 4 years quite recently. Admissions was entirely by lottery, open to everyone in the district. I can tell you that even in freshman year, the student body was not even remotely close t...
Feb 20, 2021•48 min•Ep. 433
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart Oscar Wilde supposedly said George Bernard Shaw "has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends". Socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer is the opposite: few allies, but deeply respected by his enemies. I disagree with him about everything, so naturally I am a big fan of his work - which meant I was happy to read his latest book, The Cult Of Smart . DeBoer starts with the standard narrative of The Failing State Of American E...
Feb 20, 2021•53 min•Ep. 432
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/covidvitamin-d-much-more-than-you Most health articles ask you to act on their opinions. I am specifically asking you not to act on mine. In a moment, I'll tell you whether or not I think Vitamin D prevents or treats coronavirus. But I'll give you a free spoiler: I am less than 100% certain of what I'm about to say. So if you want to take Vitamin D, take it. If it does prevent or cure coronavirus, great. If not, the worst that will happen is you'll have slig...
Feb 17, 2021•18 min•Ep. 431
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/coronavirus-links-discussion-open So far there have been three waves of coronavirus cases in the US. The first wave was the beginning, when it caught us unprepared. The second wave was in July, when we got sloppy and lifted lockdowns too soon. The third wave was November through January, because the coronavirus is seasonal and winter is its season (also probably the holidays). From Johns Hopkins CRC : A fourth wave may hit in March, when the more contagious ...
Feb 16, 2021•21 min•Ep. 430
